What's at stake:
Four months after Fresno city leaders unanimously approved reforms following a two-part Fresnoland investigation, a new public transparency portal appears to be close to the finish line.
Back in January, on the heels of a two-part Fresnoland investigation that exposed gaps in the City of Fresno’s contracting laws and its transparency with the public, city electeds promised change.
The Fresno City Council unanimously voted to close two loopholes in the city’s contracting laws and also establish the city’s first ever public transparency portal that would make city contracts, along with a number of other city reports and disclosures, easily accessible to the public.
About four months later, city officials may be close to fulfilling that promise.
The public transparency portal appears to be functional through a beta test page on the City of Fresno’s website. So far, it allows members of the public to search for the name of companies and contractors to view their city contracts and agreements.
It also allows members of the public to search for city ordinances, resolutions and city council minutes.
On Thursday, Interim City Clerk Amy Aller will lead a workshop for city officials and the wider public about her office’s progress so far in creating the transparency portal. Aller was not available for comment.
As of Wednesday morning, not all of the site’s features appear to be up and running on the beta test page. Some of the disclosures listed in the policy that city leaders approved in January aren’t available in an accessible or clearly labeled way, including:
- Lobbyist contracts
- A list of all registered lobbyists
- Behested payments
Some of those disclosures are already listed elsewhere on the City of Fresno website. However, the resolution that city officials approved in January required those documents be available “at a single location on the City’s website accessible to the public and searchable.”
The beta test page also returns search results for the salaries of top city officials by specific calendar years. However, some years appear to be missing from the search results, including 2022 to 2026.
It’s unclear how much longer it will take the City Clerk’s Office to finalize the public transparency portal. Aller, alongside members of the city’s Information Services Department, spent the last couple months putting together the portal on the city’s website.
Back in January, city leaders began talking about a model of transparency at the City of San Diego — which was prominently featured in Fresnoland’s investigation.
The City of San Diego’s website has an accessible and easy-to-scan website listing all consultants with city contracts over $25,000 going back more than a decade. Its website doesn’t require searching for any information, and clearly lays out all contracts year by year along with the value of each along with a project description, too.
Fresno city leaders even talked about San Diego’s model for transparency on the dais a few months ago.
Councilmember Miguel Arias, who sponsored the January reforms to create a public transparency portal, told Fresnoland in a Monday interview that he thinks Fresno’s transparency portal should have the same level of information as the model in San Diego.
“What I’m going to look for is how close does the portal, as currently designed, meet the ultimate transparency test that we should be striving for,” Arias told Fresnoland. “If it doesn’t, then on Thursday we’ll say we want additional features and then go ahead and proceed.”
Arias added that the public transparency portal should accessibly list all no-bid contracts along with the contractor’s name, the date it was approved and its total amount. The resolution that city officials approved in January only requires contracts worth less than $100,000.
Those limitations would exclude contracts like the ones that former Councilmember Luis Chavez gave to a consulting company run by political consultant Alex Tavlian.
According to the Fresno City Attorney’s Office, Chavez violated Fresno City Code multiple times since 2023 by awarding several contracts to Tavlian’s company worth $100,000 or less without getting city council approval.
Arias said he is going to figure out whether another resolution would need to be brought forward to expand transparency to all no-bid contracts regardless of how much they’re worth. He also said he’d ask the City Clerk’s Office for a timeline on how long it would take for the portal to have that kind of information.
Arias said he hopes the public transparency portal is soon fully functional. He thinks that’s likely, since the city isn’t relying on the services of a third-party company.
He also wants to make sure that the CIty Clerk’s Office is able to make improvements to the transparency portal without needing council approval for each and every change.
